Today's smart wireless cellular telephones (“smartphones”) are typically equipped with memory and processing capabilities that allow this category of devices to provide significant functionality. For instance, today's smartphones typically provide functionality for sending and receiving electronic mail messages (“e-mail”), browsing the World Wide Web (“the Web”), interacting with social networking services, capturing and viewing digital photographs, viewing documents, viewing and listening to multimedia content, such as movies, etc.
Although smartphones may provide functionality for viewing and listening to multimedia content, these devices have small screens with limited resolution. Also, the speakers included in smartphones are typically somewhat limited in terms of sound quality.
Due to their small screens, smartphones are generally not utilized to share content or to present content to groups of people. The small screens make sharing content with more than a few other people inconvenient at best.
Moreover, smartphones are typically not equipped with an external video output for connection to a projector or other type of external display device. As a result, smartphone users that want to share multimedia content with a group of people are typically required to use another device that is equipped with an external video output, such as a desktop or laptop computer, to output the content to an external display device. This can be inconvenient and impractical in some situations, such as for users that travel significantly and do not want to carry multiple devices.
Attempts have been made to transmit screen content from a smartphone to a device having a larger display, such as a laptop. However, processing of the screen content to put it in a format for display on the larger display is typically performed in the smartphone. This puts a heavy burden on the smartphone, resulting in a slow response time, weak performance, and battery drainage. In addition, in order to display content received from a smartphone on a device with a larger display, the smartphone and the device typically have to be equipped with the same or compatible operating systems.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure presented herein has been made.